“Emerson took an active interest in the public affairs of Boston.  He was on its School Board, and was chosen chaplain of the State Senate.  He invited the anti-slavery lecturers into his church, and helped philanthropists of other denominations in their work.  Father Taylor [the Methodist preacher to the sailors], to whom Dickens gave an English fame, found in him his most important supporter when establishing the Seaman’s Mission in Boston.  This was told me by Father Taylor himself in his old age.  I happened to be in his company once, when he spoke rather sternly about my leaving the Methodist Church; but when I spoke of the part Emerson had in it, he softened at once, and spoke with emotion of his great friend.  I have no doubt that if the good Father of Boston Seamen was proud of any personal thing, it was of the excellent answer he is said to have given to some Methodists who objected to his friendship for Emerson.  Being a Unitarian, they insisted that he must go to”—­[the place which a divine of Charles the Second’s day said it was not good manners to mention in church].—­“‘It does look so,’ said Father Taylor, ‘but I am sure of one thing:  if Emerson goes to’”—­[that place]—­“’he will change the climate there, and emigration will set that way.’”

In 1830, Emerson took part in the services at the ordination of the Reverend H.B.  Goodwin as Dr. Ripley’s colleague.  His address on giving the right hand of fellowship was printed, but is not included among his collected works.

The fair prospects with which Emerson began his life as a settled minister were too soon darkened.  In February, 1832, the wife of his youth, who had been for some time in failing health, died of consumption.

He had become troubled with doubts respecting a portion of his duties, and it was not in his nature to conceal these doubts from his people.  On the 9th of September, 1832, he preached a sermon on the Lord’s Supper, in which he announced unreservedly his conscientious scruples against administering that ordinance, and the grounds upon which those scruples were founded.  This discourse, as his only printed sermon, and as one which heralded a movement in New England theology which has never stopped from that day to this, deserves some special notice.  The sermon is in no sense “Emersonian” except in its directness, its sweet temper, and outspoken honesty.  He argues from his comparison of texts in a perfectly sober, old-fashioned way, as his ancestor Peter Bulkeley might have done.  It happened to that worthy forefather of Emerson that upon his “pressing a piece of Charity disagreeable to the will of the Ruling Elder, there was occasioned an unhappy Discord in the Church of Concord; which yet was at last healed, by their calling in the help of a Council and the Ruling Elder’s Abdication.”  So says Cotton Mather.  Whether zeal had grown cooler or charity grown warmer in Emerson’s